Gold Sponsor

Mailing Address

Stats

Syndicate

Welcome to the TriLUG home page. We are a LUG dedicated to the Triangle area including Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and Research Triangle Park. This site, along with our wiki, will enable you to keep abreast of TriLUG information (meetings, events, news), and to communicate with local Linux and FOSS (Free and Open Source) enthusiasts.

In the Linux kernel, the "device mapper" serves as a generic framework to map one block device onto another. It forms the foundation of software RAID, Logical Volume Manager, and LUKS disk encryption. In this instructional presentation, the LUG's own Alan Porter will show how to use these three device mapper facilities.

RAID can be used to provide high availability disks to a service that can not tolerate downtime. Logical Volume Manager can be used to allocate storage space as needed, without regard for where the data is physically stored. And finally, LUKS allows you to encrypt the data that is stored on a physical disk.

Alan Porter is a long-time member of TriLUG, and he is currently serving on the steering committee. In other words, when he's not talking about Linux, he tries to recruit others to talk about Linux!

NOTE - THE DECEMBER MEETING WILL NOT BE AT RED HAT.
IT WILL BE AT SPLAT SPACE IN DURHAM. STARTS AT 7PM.

MAP - http://splatspace.org/location/

Every year, we try to do something a little different for our December "holiday" meeting. This year is no exception.

We will be meeting at Splat Space, the newly-formed "hackerspace" in Durham. This meeting will be an interactive hands-on workshop, with a handful of demo stations that each showcase one Linux-based "appliance". For example, we'll show:

- BackupPC - Take an old PC and put a large hard disk on it, and let it handle your backups.
- MythTV - Watch and record TV using a Linux PC.
- Asterisk - Have your own PBX, with voice mail and call routing.

If you are interested in a particular topic, or if you would like to volunteer to run one of the demo stations, sign up on the wiki --> http://trilug.org/wiki/Meeting:2010_December_9

===============================================
For the last ten years, TriLUG has been operating as a NC non-profit corporation. In the early days, that structure was necessary because the LUG accepted donated hardware and re-donated it to schools and local LUG's. Since then, Linux has become more mainstream, accepted at corporations, and sometimes even used at schools. And in that time, TriLUG's mission has changed significantly, from being an incubator to more of an educational/technical/social group.

We're still devoted to education and outreach, promoting the use of free and open source software. However, as a business, the main income and expenses that we maintain are related to pizza and meetings.

We are entirely a volunteer-run organization. The Steering Committee members dedicate a lot of time to putting together quality programs for the members to learn from and enjoy. But there is also an overhead associated with running the LUG, and that involves paperwork, taxes and corporate filings.

Complicating matters is the fact that we are run by a collection of volunteers that changes every year in May. As the LUG's leadership undergoes its annual transition, we rely on effective hand-off's. Over time, the Steering Committee has been focused on tactical problems: where to find speakers, the price of pizza, finding donors and sponsors. In the meantime, some of the hand-off's and administrative tasks have taken a back seat. In fact, we have sometimes been delinquent in some of our administrative duties. This is not a recent problem... it has persisted for several years.

The meeting on 12/2 is for interested LUG members to discuss the current state of the LUG as an organization, and to brainstorm on possible changes that might make reduce our administrative overhead. We will not be planning meeting content or sysadmin duties or other tactical things -- this meeting is strategic. It's the boring stuff -- paying taxes, filing paperwork.

The "fun" stuff -- meetings, events, technical discussions, and so on -- will continue as normal.

In the old days, it took a studio full of equipment to produce and record music. But now, the required tools are much more affordable, and can easily fit into a home studio. There is a wide selection of very robust audio applications that run on standard PC hardware, and many of them are FREE ("free" as in "beer" -- but also as in "freedom").

Adam Drew has been playing and recording music on and with computers for 15 years. He was introduced to free and open source software when he went to work at Red Hat, where he does filesystem and cluster support.

Adam will show how anyone can use Linux-based software to produce studio-quality music. We'll look at what tools are available, how they work together, and we'll see and hear them in action. We'll also learn a bit about what community resources are available for learning more about the tools and technology so that you can get plugged in and start making music at home and get your questions answered when they come up.

Come join us for a lively toe-tapping demonstration!

--

Adam invites you to take a look at (and edit) his audio knowledgebase at http://LinkedListCorruption.com/audio-kbase . And if you need to reach him personally, send him an email at adam@LinkedListCorruption.com .

We would also like to thank our meeting sponsor, Uzoma Nwosu from the Signal Foundation (www.signalfest.com).

Title: Introduction to ModSecurity, the Open Source Web Application Firewall

About this talk:

So your web server listens on port 80 and your firewall blocks most everything else. Secure, right? How about that port 80? Do you trust your application code? Is your server patched? Are your developers really more clever than the folks who want to break in? Is security even on the mind of your developers?

Our traditional firewalls (packet filters) may have narrowed the field to HTTP, but crackers and worms have responded by refocusing their efforts directly at HTTP. Worse yet, most packet filters think all HTTP requests look legitimate. What's your next line of defense?

This presentation introduces ModSecurity, a web application firewall (WAF). ModSecurity is open source, mature, stable, flexible, and updated frequently. It can run embedded in Apache or as a reverse proxy in front of any traditional web server. It is highly discriminating and it definitely understands HTTP at a deeper level than your packet filter.

Come learn how to get started with ModSecurity. You'll be glad that you did.

About the presenter:

Cristóbal Palmer, a long-time member of the TriLUG Steering Committee, just finished his MSIS at UNC Chapel Hill, where he is a Systems Administrator with ibiblio.org. He also works with Caktus Consulting Group, a local django development shop.